We Must Stop Dracula... From Organizing His Library!
SPOILER ALERT!
This is not a full review of The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova because I don’t remember enough about this book to make one. What I do remember, the mind-numbingly stupid detail that has been forever etched in my mind, is the fact that Dracula really needed a librarian and that if he ever got one to organize his vast collection of books, some of them incredibly rare, we’d all be doomed! Doomed, I tell you! DOOMED! Because apparently by reading thousands of outdated, though no doubt very interesting, books, Dracula would be able to achieve world domination.
Maybe I’m exaggerating. Maybe the whole Dracula-needs-a-librarian plot wasn’t as prominent as I remember. Maybe there was some other masterplan that I missed because the extreme ridiculousness of that plot overrode everything. Maybe after more than 600 pages no conclusion could ever have lived up to my expectations. Whatever. In Kostova’s book, Vlad, the Impaler is essentially demoted to “the Historian”. Sure, impaling people is scary, but you know what’s even scarier? Having a really big library! Sharp stakes really can’t compare to the philosophical impact of The Analects. Can you imagine how dangerous Dracula could become if he ever read Machiavelli’s The Prince? (I mean the original version, not Machiavelli on Modern Leadership, or Machiavelli in Mindset, or Leadership Lessons from Niccolo Machiavelli and The Prince, or How to Choose a Leader: Machiavelli’s Advice to Citizens, or even Sun Tzu and Machiavelli: Success and Leadership Principles for the Modern World)
Since the real Vlad died around 1477 and The Historian was written in 2005, this means that Dracula had 528 years to learn how to organize his books and somehow, he didn’t. Clearly, he's not a quick learner. And yet we're supposed to be afraid of all the knowledge he's going to gain from a well organized library. Also, don’t forget that the current library was accumulated over more than five centuries, and he didn’t start out with thousands of books. If he was actually reading them, he wouldn't need help cataloguing them. Dracula is just a book hoarder, and if he didn’t read those books until now, he won’t be reading them ever. It’s like me and Asimov’s Foundation series. I’ve been thinking I should read it for ages. I got the surprisingly thin first book. It’s right there on the shelf, and yet, I just never got around to actually reading it. Dracula should really just move on and find another hobby.
Now, I don’t quite remember the whole world domination thing, but I think it was based on the notion that if you know a lot about history (IIRC, which would explain why Dracula wanted a historian to catalogue his books rather than a professional librarian) (holy shit! that means that plot point actually makes sense!) you’ll be able to predict it. However, unless one of those ancient uncatalogued books in Dracula’s library of evil explains how to handle drones (or he’s like Tluhluh and can reassemble after being sploshed), it shouldn’t be that difficult for a real army to handle him and his librarian minions. Sure, missiles don’t have the elegance of Sun Tzu’s “appear strong when you are weak, and weak when you are strong”, but they can be pretty effective, which I’m sure Machiavelli would approve.
Look, I can forgive a dumb plot if the book is short (the exception being Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist), but at over 600 pages, no way!
By Danforth